If you have ever had some file you wanted to hide but had no way to do it, you have come to the right tutorial. I will show you how to literally make a folder invisible to most people. First thing to do is decide where you want your hidden folder to be. For this tutorial, I will do it right on the desktop. For best results you can make your background color (no pictures) the same as the selected icon color. (I will show you how). First make the folder on the desktop that you want to make hidden.
This shows the folder that I created on the desktop.
Right-click on the folder you just created and click on properties.
This window will appear. Click on the customize tab.
Click on the change icon button.
This window will appear which gives you all the prefabricated icons you can use for your folder. Scroll to the right until you see the blank spots (as above). Click on any one of the three and click on OK.
As you can see, or icon is now blank. We can still see the text though. Let’s take care of that next.
Right click on the “icon” (where there would be an icon) and select Rename. It highlights the text name for you to begin typing. Simply press and hold the Alt key then press 255 and then release the Alt key. Finally press enter, The text should have vanished and when you pressed enter you saved the name. The reason the text vanished, is it actually isn’t a blank filename now. Alt+255 puts a null character there instead of the normal space. Since null is an actual ASCII character the system thinks it is a valid name for the folder and uses it.
You should now only see a little blue box where the folder used to be(if you have the folder selected). When you select it you are simply selecting the null character (which is the name of the file). Most people would stop here, this will help you to find the folder so that you can click on it. However, we can go one step further.
Right-click anywhere on the desktop to get a drop-down menu and select properties.
This window will then be displayed. Click on the desktop tab at the top of the screen.
Under the desktop tab, you will see the above screen. Make sure that the background is set to none. Then pick the color from the dropdown box that you want you background color to be. Just remember what it is, you will need to use it again later. For this tutorial, I will use black (my background is already black). Once you have selected it, choose the appearance tab at the top of the screen.
The above window will be displayed. Click on the advanced button in the lower right hand corner.
This box will then appear. Select “Selected Items” from the Item drop down box. Then change the Color for Color1 to the same color that you selected as your background. Click on OK for this top Window, then Apply and OK on the next Window. You should now be at the desktop.
If you select a couple of folders you will notice that they have a black tint to them now instead of blue. In the picture above I actually have the folder that we hid selected as well, you just can’t tell.
In order to select the folder, I use a selection box around the area of the folder, and then press enter. It will then open the folder.
As you can see, I am in a folder that is in the hidden folder. The name of the folder is shown in the address bar as a blank. That concludes how to hide a folder. It is not perfect, but will fool the majority of people. Thank-you for viewing.
